SAN FRANCISCO – U.S. police departments used location data and other user information from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to track protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, according to a report from the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday. Facebook, which also owns Instagram, and Twitter shut off the data access of Geofeedia, the Chicago-based data vendor that provided data to police, in response to the ACLU findings. The report comes amid growing concerns among consumers and regulators about how online data is being used and how closely tech companies are cooperating with the government on surveillance. "These special data deals were allowing the police to sneak in through a side door and use these powerful platforms to track protesters," said Nicole Ozer, the ACLU's technology and civil liberties policy director. The ACLU report found that as recently as July, Geofeedia touted its social media monitoring product as a tool to monitor protests.

A jury in Australia has heard an audio recording of a woman pleading with her Tinder date to be allowed to leave his apartment, before she fell 14 floors from the balcony and died. Warriena Wright met Gable Tostee for the first time on the night she died. There is no allegation that he pushed her - rather it is believed she was trying to climb down. The court also saw photographs the couple took together. They had been chatting on the dating app Tinder and met in person at a seaside resort called Surfers Paradise, on Queensland's Gold Coast.

During a recent interview with Erik Lindberg, Senior Director for Westlaw Product Management, not only did I get the scoop on the latest emerging technologies from Westlaw, but I also got to pick his brain about how younger generations are influencing advancements in legal technology and the future of the legal industry. Take a look at his thoughts, and share your own ideas and experiences with us on social media. How are Gen Y and Gen Z attorneys driving advancements in legal technology? They're used to having the world in their pocket and being able to get information much more quickly. They consume and interact with information sources and technology in a completely different way than generations before.

Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft pledged to address the privacy, security and ethical challenges of AI. NEW YORK -- Five leading tech companies launched a new effort Wednesday to head off government regulation of artificial intelligence, the fast-growing field at the heart of self-driving cars, digital assistants and other emerging technologies. Through the so-called Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft pledged to address the privacy, security and ethical challenges of AI -- by funding new research and setting up industry best practices -- as they invest heavily in complex algorithms that can understand human speech or comb through vast amounts of data. "The positive impacts of AI will depend not only on the quality of our algorithms, but on the level of public engagement," said Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company purchased by Google, and a co-chair of the new group. He and other leaders, speaking with reporters Wednesday, said the technology could reduce traffic congestion, tackle climate change and more.

According to an ACLU blog post published on Tuesday, law enforcement officials implemented a far-reaching surveillance program to track protesters in both Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD during their recent uprisings and relied on special feeds of user data provided by three top social media companies: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Specifically, all three companies granted access to a developer tool called Geofeedia which allows users to see the geographic origin of social media posts and has been employed by more than 500 law enforcement organizations to track protesters in real time. Law enforcement's ability to monitor the online activities of protesters could have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights, the post asserts. "These platforms need to be doing more to protect the free speech rights of activists of color and stop facilitating their surveillance by police," Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the ACLU of California, told the Washington Post. "The ACLU shouldn't have to tell Facebook or Twitter what their own developers are doing. The companies need to enact strong public policies and robust auditing procedures to ensure their platforms aren't being used for discriminatory surveillance."

The recent progress in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning makes questions about the ethics of AI more pressing than ever. Most tech companies and their employees want to do good in the world. We all have an image of our better selves or "at our best." We also want to avoid the risks that come with the increasing public scrutiny of ethical lapses. The main idea behind Humans & Machines Ethics Canvas is to have a blueprint from ideation to successful completion of the project for individual, teams and organisations.

A demonstrator is arrested during a protest marking the one-year anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown along West Florrisant Street on Aug.10, 2015 in Ferguson, Mo. (Photo: Scott Olson, Getty Images) SAN FRANCISCO -- Police monitored and tracked protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., using data from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram provided by a Chicago company that analyzes social media for law enforcement, according to the ACLU. The data provided to police by Geofeedia included the locations of users. The ACLU said after it alerted the social media companies, Instagram cut off Geofeedia's access to public user posts and Facebook cut off its access to a topic-based stream of public user posts. Twitter suspended the company, Geofeedia, from receiving its commercial data, Twitter said in a tweet Tuesday. In an emailed statement, Facebook said Geofeedia had access to data that Facebook users make public.

The first episode of HBO's Westworld heavily implied that a terrified robot was being raped -- and not for the first time either. Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), a 30-year-old automaton that thinks it's a 30-year-old woman, cries and begs and screams. But there are people who go in for this sort of thing. Porn sharing communities often call rape-themed videos "struggle porn" or hide behind neologisms like "painal." The ones that focus on robots are more forward than that because there is no crime implied.

BRISBANE, Australia – A New Zealand tourist was so afraid of an Australian man she met through the dating app Tinder that she fell 14 floors to her death while trying to escape from his apartment balcony, a prosecutor told a court on Monday. A woman was so terrified of her Tinder date'she fell 14 floors to her death in bid to escape him' https://t.co/E6KTEeSwdG Gable Tostee, 30, pleaded not guilty in the Queensland state Supreme Court in Brisbane to the murder of 26-year-old Warriena Wright in Gold Coast city in the early hours of Aug. 8, 2014. Tostee and the Lower Hutt woman met for the first time in the tourist center of Surfers Paradise on the night she died. Prosecutor Glen Cash told the jury that Tostee did not throw Wright to her death, but intimidated and threatened her to an extent that she felt the only way to escape was to climb down from his balcony.

MOSCOW--When Russian clubgoers flocked to the country's biggest electronic music festival this summer, they didn't have to bring a camera or even their phones. Instead, festival organizers used facial-identification technology to pick out revelers and send them their pictures directly to their phone. All they needed to do was opt in, by sending a selfie. The technology is the product of NTechLab, a Moscow-based firm whose algorithm to identify facial features is getting attention in the broader information technology world. NTechLab co-founders Artem Kukharenko and Alexander Kabakov believe the possible uses of their technology are almost endless, and mostly positive: from allowing police to search for criminals in real time, to helping amusement parks identify and sell photos to their guests.